Susan Zhuang skips border czar meeting with NYC Council Common Sense Caucus: ‘Leave decent hardworking families alone.’

The City Council’s conservative Common Sense Caucus met privately with border czar Tom Homan on Thursday to reinforce their support for stepping up deportations of “criminals” in the city, and called on Mayor Eric Adams to take executive action to get rid of the city’s sanctuary protections.

But one member of the caucus, herself an immigrant from China, was not at the meeting. City Council Member Susan Zhuang, a conservative Democrat who represents the council’s first Asian majority district in Brooklyn, expressed a different, more personal perspective on the issue. “I am an immigrant. No one can ever tell me about the challenges faced by newcomers to New York and to this nation,” Zhuang wrote in a text, when asked why she wasn’t at the meeting. She also said that she had a scheduling conflict. “Decent hardworking people should be left alone. We need them. Not every immigrant is a criminal. Find the criminals and deport them, yes. But leave decent hard-working families alone,” she added.

In an interview, Zhuang later said that she agrees that criminals should be deported, but that she believes that the vast majority of immigrants are good. “I’m an immigrant – I cannot abandon my own community. It’s very different from the other council members, even in the Common Sense Caucus,” she said. “The good people should stay. We cannot deport everyone. This is going crazy right now.”

Council Member Inna Vernikov, who was born in Ukraine and previously practiced immigration law, said that she wasn’t at the meeting either, but because of a personal matter. She said her office sent their legislative director to the meeting in her place, and expressed support for getting rid of sanctuary protections. 

Homan was in New York City for the second time to meet with Adams. Several hours after the meeting, Adams said in a press release that he is now working to reopen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations on Rikers Island through an executive order. An ICE office at the jails complex was closed over a decade ago. Now, Adams said in a statement, “ICE agents would specifically be focused on assisting the correctional intelligence bureau in their criminal investigations, in particular those focused on violent criminals and gangs.”

Council Member Bob Holden, who was elected on both Democrat and Republican party lines and who serves as chair of the Common Sense Caucus, said that the meeting with Homan was held to reinforce their support for getting rid of sanctuary policies and the mayor not doing more.

“We told Tom Homan, the border czar, that there are situations that the mayor has said he would do certain things that he hasn’t done yet. And most importantly, what the Common Sense Caucus feels, is (we should) get the criminals off the streets,” Holden told reporters after the meeting. “Get them out of our city, get them out of our country. … And the mayor has to make good on some of his promises.” Holden did not get into what specific promises have been made, and the mayor’s press secretary did not answer whether specific promises had been made in Adams’ first meeting with Homan in December. After that meeting, Adams said that he was considering executive orders to change sanctuary policy. 

Under current sanctuary policies in the city, local law enforcement is barred from turning immigrants over to federal immigration authorities unless they have been convicted of certain serious and violent crimes.